P.S. Our project started in Django 0.9 and has been carried forward one version at a time. Presumably at some point this was the suggested way of doing this, and it's worked up until 1.4. The change is fine, and the error message is helpful, but the release notes need to include this.

I am going to mark this as wontfix. This is how our deprecation documentation worked for 1.4 release (there might be improvements in later releases), and changing that now for 1.4 isn't going to happen.